Oracle Table and Index Partitioning for SAP Applications: Overview


	Oracle Partitioning enhances the manageability, performance, and availability of a wide variety of applications. Partitioning allows tables, indexes, and index-organized tables to be subdivided into smaller pieces, enabling these database objects to be managed and accessed at a finer level of granularity. Oracle provides a comprehensive range of partitioning schemes to address every business requirement. Moreover, since it is entirely transparent in SQL statements, partitioning can be applied to any application, from OLTP (e.g. SAP ERP) to Data Warehousing (e.g. SAP BI).

ORACLE PARTITIONING SCHEMES

Range Partitioning maps data to partitions based on ranges of partition key values that you establish for each partition. It is the most common type of partitioning and is often used with dates. In standard SAP BI installations on Oracle, PSA and fact tables are range-partitioned.
List Partitioning complements the functionality of range partitioning. Range partitioning is useful for segmenting a table along a continuous domain – e.g. time, so that each partition contains the data for a given range (week, month) of time values. In contrast, list partitioning is useful for segmenting a table along a discrete domain – e.g. locations. Each partition in a list partitioning scheme corresponds to a list of discrete values.
Hash Partitioning maps data to partitions based on a hashing algorithm which Oracle applies to a partitioning key that you identify. The hashing algorithm evenly distributes rows among partitions, giving partitions approximately the same size.